When Artificial Intelligence Meets Nuclear Energy...

Does it lessen the threat of nuclear arms?

Last week, The Norwegian Nobel Committee chose to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo. The world praised the committee for its proactive selection at a time of great urgency, but many wondered who exactly would be called the "laureate".

Cambridge defines the word as a person who has been given a very high honor because of their ability in a subject of study.

In reality, this is not the first time we have seen the Peace Prize being given to an organization. In 2022, it was awarded to the Center for Civil Liberties and numerous others before. It's not even the first time for the nuclear option. International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons won the prize in 2017. According to the website,

The decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 to Nihon Hidankyo is securely anchored in Alfred Nobel’s will. This year’s prize joins a distinguished list of Peace Prizes that the Committee has previously awarded to champions of nuclear disarmament and arms control.

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 fulfils Alfred Nobel’s desire to recognise efforts of the greatest benefit to humankind.

The rest of the Nobels in science were dominated by Artificial Intelligence and its academic footprint in 2024.

Like most years, scholars were unsurprised by the 2024 selections. The complete list is truly a marvel of achievements. However, for some, the balancing act was hidden in plain sight. As AI continues to surge, tech giants like Google are inclining toward nuclear energy as a sustainable solution to its massive power needs.

This week, Google signed a deal to use small nuclear reactors to generate the vast amounts of energy needed to power its artificial intelligence data centres.

At the UN's Climate Change Conference last year, the US joined a group of countries that wanted to triple their nuclear energy capacity by 2050 as part of efforts to move away from fossil fuels.

While Google is pushing to gain favors by anointing it a major step in tech’s embrace of nuclear energy, the threats of AI, Nuclear warfare, and Climate Change still loom at large. The only thing certain is the continuous efforts and immense power required to offset the risks associated with the Big Three.

Maybe AI turns out to be not that bad?

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